In remote Uyghur province, Uighurs are under siege

Veiled women pass a statue of Chairman Mao in Kashgar, Xinjiang Province, China the day after the July 30 stabbing death of the ancient Silk Road city’s chief imam.

Ahmet raises a trembling hand to his face, taking off his glasses and wiping away tears. His voice quivers as he speaks, but not in sadness. He is afraid. Five days earlier, he was at his nephew’s house when security forces suddenly descended. The nephew had grown a beard. And in Xinjiang, the sprawling region that dominates China’s western flank and the locus of persistent civil strife, that’s often enough to put a man behind bars.

The nephew was taken away, as were his wife and their daughter, not yet a year old. When Ahmet tried to intervene he, too, spent the night in a cell that was too small to let him lie down. Through the bars, he watched men with long sticks walk to where his nephew was being held – and for the next 20 hours heard the young man’s screams.

Although beaten as well, Ahmet was released the next day. His nephew, whom he describes as devout but mild-mannered, was not – raising the fear that he could be locked away for a decade.

Such fear is not unfounded: Ahmet and his family are Uighurs, the largely Muslim minority that calls Xinjiang home and is being blamed for a rising tide of unrest in the region. Most recently, 96 people died and hundreds wound up behind bars two weeks ago after what the state-run Xinhua news agency called a “carefully planned terrorist attack of vile nature and tremendous violence.”

But there is tremendous violence taking place on both sides.

The bloodshed more than doubled the death toll from what had been – for two months – the worst act of terrorism ever committed on Chinese soil: 39 deaths May 22 at a market in the regional capital, Urumqi.

Beijing has responded swiftly and forcibly, spurred by President Xi Jinping’s pledge during a visit to Xinjiang just three weeks earlier to “make terrorists like rats scurrying across a street.” Declaring its own “war on terror,” the government radically restricted expressions of faith – including a ban on fasting (which is essential to Ramadan).

It also sent troops bearing assault rifles to street corners, mosques, airports, hospitals, schools and train stations across the region.

“I feel like I’m in a battlefield in Iraq,” says Fa Te, a 21-year-old Uighur resident of Urumqi. Soldiers are “everywhere.”

Some Muslims, like many of Xinjiang’s ethnic Chinese residents, support the crackdown. They argue that an iron fist is necessary to maintain safety.

But the extent of the repression and violence being employed raises troubling questions about whether the real goal is to contain “extremists” or simply to crush the Uighurs, a minority that fits uncomfortably into Beijing’s vision of a singular “Chinese dream.”

The government’s conduct in Xinjiang also poses new questions for an international community that has largely muted its criticism of China’s contentious human-rights practices in exchange for a smoother path to lucrative trade.

Are other nations, in the name of commerce, prepared to overlook China’s chokehold on the religious practice of millions of its own citizens? It’s an issue that Canada, having chided Beijing for its repressive policies only to pursue energy sales aggressively, may have to face in a particularly direct way: Xinjiang is a major centre for Chinese oil and gas, and at least one company based there has toured western Canada, looking for potential investments.

About the photos

The images accompanying this report are the work of award-winning Canadian photographer Kevin Frayer.

Even the clock is divided

Compared with the Audi-choked freeways and glass towers of Beijing, Xinjiang is a world apart. Urumqi is 3,000 kilometres – about the distance between Toronto and Medicine Hat – from the nation’s capital. Even when the first high-speed rail line reaches the region next year, bullet trains travelling at 300 km/h will take 12 hours to arrive from Beijing.

Xinjiang is an isolated sprawl of mountains, grassy steppes and dune-strafed deserts, a place whose isolation from the rest of China is evident even in the time. Local Han people, who are ethnically Chinese, use standard Beijing time, as do airports and train stations. Uighurs, and their restaurants and hotels, operate two hours later, in keeping with their western location.

A Uighur man tries on a new traditional hat as he buys new clothes before the Eid holiday. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Uighur women laugh as they take care of their children at home. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

On fundamental points of history, too, there is little agreement. Uighur historians point to evidence of their settlement that dates back millennia, when Xinjiang was a waypoint on the ancient Silk Road travelled by camels and elephants, while their Han Chinese counterparts emphasize the fact that it has spent centuries under Chinese rule.

That the “Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region” is religiously and culturally unique, however, is beyond dispute. Islam arrived in the ninth century, largely displacing Buddhism. Today, many Uighurs are intellectually and linguistically oriented west toward Central Asia and the Middle East – watching Iranian music videos and reading Turkish news sites – rather than east toward coastal China.

Their home territory has, however, experienced tremendous change since the Communist Revolution in 1949. Briefly an independent state in the early 20th century, Xinjiang has in the past few decades become home to vast numbers of ethnic Chinese, many of them sent here by government settlement policies.

Police in riot gear secure the area outside China’s largest mosque July 30 after Kashgar’s chief imam – an outspoken foe of Uighur activism – was found stabbed to death. ‘I feel like I’m in a battlefield in Iraq,’ says one Xinjiang resident. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

They now outnumber the Uighurs, and continue to arrive, drawn by untrammelled space and the jobs that flow from a land rich in resources.

But the wealth hasn’t necessarily benefited the Uighur population. As the region’s oil and gas flow east, local filling stations routinely run short, with lineups 150 cars long.

Xinjiang accounts for 28 per cent of China’s natural-gas reserves, which are being tapped at a roaring rate by a country eager to fuel its remarkable growth with its own energy. Between 2000 and 2012, gas output increased sixfold, while oil production rose by half. Some 60 per cent of Xinjiang’s gross domestic product is now derived from petroleum.

And for all the jobs that development has brought, the region has China’s highest rate of unemployed college graduates – 80 per cent of them minorities, many of them Muslim. Job postings sometimes demand Han Chinese outright. A former manager at a large Western company in Urumqi says that, of 400 employees, only 10 were Uighur.

I want a Starbucks so badly. Xinjiang should be like foreign countries, with more equal rights.

Fa TeA 20-something café owner pines for a taste of the West – and some room to breathe

Against this backdrop for the Uighur population – reduced to minority status in their homeland, often failing to get the best jobs, watching local wealth piped away – discontent has simmered.

Protests have erupted, calling for everything from basic equality to outright separatism.

At times the anger has turned violent: In 2009, a riot in Urumqi led to 200 deaths. Last October, a radical Uighur group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, claimed responsibility for a car explosion that killed five and injured 40 in Tiananmen Square – the heart of Beijing.

But the biggest shock for many in China came with the May attack in Urumqi.

It was early on a Thursday morning, at one of the city’s busiest early markets. Li, a garbage truck driver (willing to disclose only his surname), was in bed when he heard screaming. He ran to his living-room window and saw two SUVs travelling side by side, progressing quite slowly – because they were driving on top of the shoppers crowding the street.

“They were all old people – they were hit once and did not get back up,” he says.

A Uighur family in Kashgar prays before a lunch to mark the Islamic holiday of Eid. Under Beijing’s one-year crackdown on terrorism, the fasting that is the essence of Ramadan was banned, with residents paid to report any ‘engagement in feudal superstitions’ they may see. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The screaming woke his eight-year-old daughter. “She told me, ‘The grandmas and grandpas are lying on the ground there,’ ” he says. “I told her terrible things had happened.”

As the SUVs made their way, those inside also tossed explosives into the crowd. Then the vehicles suddenly came to a stop and burst into flames with a massive sound.

“The first car exploding – I thought it was an earthquake,” one shopkeeper recalls.

Mr. Li took photos of the aftermath on his cellphone, and says he heard dozens of explosions as 136 people were either killed or injured.

The next day, China announced a one-year crackdown on “violent terrorist activities.” After the first month, officials reported having made more than 380 arrests, seizing 264 explosive devices and breaking up 32 terrorist gangs. Dozens of people accused of planning attacks have been executed, with hundreds more sent to jail.

The crackdown has added to the weight many Uighurs already feel, pinned down by a state that sinks deeply into their daily lives – always watching and, in the name of stability and safety, stripping away the culture and religion that makes them distinctive.

China’s unease with religion is evident in the very document meant to protect civil liberties – the constitution prevents religious discrimination by the state but grants it great regulatory latitude. “Nobody,” it reads, “can make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt social order.”

1.Urumqi, the region’s capital, was the scene of a horrific bombing attack in May that left 136 people dead or wounded, and sparked the current crisis.

2.Subashi is the site of a lost Buddhist city that Beijing says is proof ethnic Chinese occupied Xinjiang centuries before the Uighurs arrived.

3.When villagers in Alahagezhen protested against the treatment of women wearing the veil, police opened fire, killing three, and arrested hundreds.

4.Aksu was the scene of a 2010 suicide bombing that left seven people dead, five of them Uighur police.

5.A key crossroad of the ancient silk route, Kashgar lost its chief imam on July 30 when the staunch Communist Party supporter was stabbed to death three days after dozens died in clashes with police.

6.Official accounts say 96 people died in Yarkand (also known as Shache) on July 28 after attacking police. Local observers contend they were massacred.

Uighurs wait at a bus stop on July 27, 2014 in old Kashgar.(Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Islam by fiat

A broad reading of that statement has allowed Beijing to restrict the practice of Islam in Xinjiang. Local Muslims cannot wear traditional dress, grow their beards long or pray where and when they want to. Who and where the Koran can be read are also subject to state control.

Enforcement is not subtle.

Across the street from one mosque in Urumqi, a pack of heavily armed soldiers glares out from a thick metal cage with a sign warning people to stay away. At another mosque, soldiers surround a hulking armoured personnel carrier pointed directly at a busy entrance; a steady strobe of flashes from a camera mounted above the street captures the licence plates of each passing car.

Travel for Uighurs is difficult. In rural areas, locals need permission just to leave their villages. Roads are dotted with checkpoints, often minutes apart, where ID cards must be presented.

A Uighur couple have their first dance at their wedding celebration after being married on August 2, 2014 in Kashgar. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

A Uighur bride talks with a friend at her wedding celebration on August 2, 2014 in Kashgar. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Passports are almost impossible to obtain (unless an applicant can afford to pay a bribe as high as 300,000 renminbi, or $52,000). For most, travel to the Hajj is not worth attempting.

In big cities, new airport-style security checks for bus travel are forcing even grandmothers to use taxis when shopping – milk cartons are over the limit for liquids. The entrance to one Uighur-owned hotel is covered by eight cameras, capturing every possible approach.

People do what they can to evade the constant surveillance. Ahmet attended a recent meeting with businessmen who had traded their smartphones for cheap dumb ones, believing their movements and conversations were being monitored. When on the Internet, many Uighurs avoid making even innocuous references to their own history or poetry, for fear of angering the authorities.

Rather than pushing Ahmet, a published author, away from his faith, though, the government stranglehold has driven him deeper into it.

“Who can help me?” he asks. “Only God.”

He says he does not support terrorism and suicide bombing, but can see why people might decide to end their lives – and those around them – with one final angry act. “The next life,” he explains, “will be better.”

Sometimes, the next life seems too long to wait.

In my understanding, [authorities] fear that, if Muslims read the Koran and build their knowledge, they will threaten the state’s power. But what Muslims need is freedom, not power.

A teacher identifying himself only as Roch

Alahagezhen is a small village south of Urumqi, less than 250 kilometres from China’s borders with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. It is home to a couple of cellphone stores, an electronics repair shop and several restaurants.

For the rest of the world, it may as well not exist: A search on Google returns not a single English-language reference.

It is in places like this, far from scrutiny, that China’s uglier practices sometimes take root.

For years, Alahagezhen has been best known for its Tuesday bazaar, where local honey sells alongside spices and aphrodisiacs. Several weeks ago, that bazaar turned deadly, after a group of women, some of them still school age, came to shop in traditional attire, against China’s strict regulations. Their faces covered except for their eyes, they were detained by police.

But their husbands spread the word, and a crowd gathered. Anger welled, and chanting broke out: “We want our freedom! Where is our freedom?”

As more people joined the protest, soldiers were called in, according to a teacher with friends who saw what happened.

An elderly Uighur man who said he was 100 years old listens to his wife as they sit in an alleyway before breaking their fast before the Eid holiday. Nearly 100 people have been killed in unrest in the restive Xinjiang Province in the last week of July, 2014 in what authorities say is terrorism but advocacy groups claim is a result of a government crackdown to silence opposition to its policies. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

“They warned people by shooting into the air, but the shots hit some high-voltage cables, which fell and killed two people,” he says, identifying himself only as Roch.

That just made the crowd more angry, and soldiers opened fire, killing another three.

More than 200 people were arrested, he adds, their families not told where they’d been taken. Later, some were released, and “told us they were beaten.”

The riot was confirmed by a local shopkeeper, who is Han Chinese and said it began when the police were “educating” the women, and “their families … made trouble.” Today, a metal fence lines the road where the bazaar used to be.

No place for a child

Similarly stark, if less visible, is the barrier China has built around Uighur children. Those under 18 are not allowed to attend mosque or study the Koran. “No teacher can participate in religious activities, instill religious thoughts in students or coerce students into religious activities,” reads a notice posted recently on a grade school’s website, according to the Associated Press.

Ignoring the ban can have serious consequences: One of Roch’s former Islamic teachers has spent a decade in jail; another was detained in early June, along with his wife, and no one knows when or if they will return.

Uighur boys play with toy guns on the Eid holiday in alleyway in old Kashgar. Beijing says it is investing heavily in the Xinjiang region but Uighurs are increasingly dissatisfied with the influx of Han Chinese and uneven economic development. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

“In my understanding, [authorities] fear that, if Muslims read the Koran and build their knowledge, they will threaten the state’s power,” Roch says. “But what Muslims need is freedom, not power.”

Uighur students also are no longer free to study in their own tongue, a Turkic language written in the Arabic script. They must enroll in “bilingual” classes – where all the textbooks, except one for Uighur as a second language, are in Chinese only.

One teacher says that, because the new curriculum does not allow for enough practice, “at least two to three students can’t write Uighur” in each of the first middle-school classes to use it.

The teacher supports bilingual education. “Chinese is the national language” and, without it, career opportunities are limited.

But seeing Uighur students unable to communicate properly in their own language “makes me very sad and very uncomfortable,” he says.

“Lose your own tongue, and your ethnicity basically means nothing.”

Battle over who came first

Not far from Alahagezhen, the Subashi ruins stand like a sentinel of the past against the jagged Tianshan range.

The adobe remnants of an ancient Buddhist temple date from the third century – ancient history China is happy to exploit to emphasize the area’s pre-Islamic past and links with long-ago dynasties.

A local government employee who works on historical preservation drives the message home. Uighurs, he says, argue that “Xinjiang is the place where Muslims are, but they don’t understand history – it used to be the Han people here. They came in from elsewhere.”

A short drive away, the point is further emphasized at a museum in an old palace that is still home to an elderly Uighur who is China’s last living minority prince. A sign there says that, by the mid-seventh century, the Han dynasty had established a military dominion over the region. Uighur history, and the establishment of Islam in the region centuries ago, is not mentioned.

A Uighur boy sits atop a horse as he has his picture taken outside the Id Kah Mosque before the Eid holiday in old Kashgar. China’s Muslim Uighur ethnic group faces cultural and religious restrictions by the Chinese government. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Instead, the museum displays a list of “18 Xinjiang Oddities,” such as: “Men love to wear flowery hats,” and “Beautiful jade dipped into alcohol makes alcohol better,” and “The names of locations on the ancient Silk Road are very odd.” The presentation offers a glimpse of an administration often prepared to trivialize Uighur people, or ignore them.

It’s a policy with profound consequences, even among those who fit most closely into Beijing’s mould.

On a small side street not far from Xinjiang University in Urumqi, a café sells hand-ground coffee, hand-formed hamburgers and pizza using hand-kneaded dough. The decor features the cover of Abbey Road, while Eminem, Adele and Michael Jackson rock from the speakers.

The shop is run by a group of Uighurs in their twenties, who speak Chinese well – in many ways, just what central China wants to see.

Fa Te is one of the owners. He surfs Instagram, rocks a mean beatbox and drinks beer with friends in his basement man-cave. He lusts for the outside world.

“I want a Starbucks so badly,” he says.

But that’s not all he wants. “Xinjiang should be like foreign countries, with more equal rights,” Mr. Fa says.

Local authorities have begun to stop people who look Uighur on the street asking for identification.

“I was born here, I grew up here for 20 years. This is my home,” Mr. Fa says. “What do you mean, you want to check my ID card?”

Like Ahmet, he has no sympathy for Uighurs whose anger has turned deadly. “I hate them,” he says. “They hurt innocent people.”

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Ten thousand people watched this public sentencing and arrest gathering in Xinjiang’s Tekesi [Tekes] County, Yili [Ili] Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture on June 16, 2014. Image credit: Tekesi County People’s Court

Part of doing justice in the criminal process is protecting the dignity of people in custody, presuming their innocence, and providing them with the conditions necessary for fair trial. China’s decisions to prohibit public executions, in 1979, and ban “perp walks” for sex workers, in 2010, seemed to acknowledge at least some of these principles, but ongoing public arrests and sentencing and televised confessions indicate that dignity and fairness are not afforded equally to all Chinese citizens.

Public arrests and sentencing are often held in large outdoor public spaces like plazas and stadiums and feature the accused bound and flanked by police—at times with placards around their necks—in front of crowds of spectators that can number in the thousands. According toPhoenix Weekly, at least 196 “public displays of law enforcement” (i.e., public arrests and sentencing) were reported on by Chinese news media between 2008 and May 2011. More than 90 percent of the gatherings were in smaller cities, i.e., county-level cities and municipally administered districts. The report says that the gatherings aim to “frighten criminals, educate people, and maintain social stability.”

Historically, public arrest and sentencing rallies were widely used in and outside China to crush political opponents and consolidate the power of royal families. In the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, mass rallies served to educate the public about the errors of class enemies, including Kuomintang members and landlords.

Legal experts have spoken out against modern-day public arrests and sentencing, branding them “campaign-style justice” that emphasizes swift and severe punishment. In July 2010, Renmin University of China Law Professor Guo Weidong told Legal Daily that gatherings like these violate the presumption of innocence that requires the court to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant. Several legal experts joined the call for a legislative ban of these public rallies after more than 20,000 spectators witnessed the arrest of about 70 criminal suspects who were paraded in a public plaza in Qidong County, Hunan Province, on April 12, 2011. The rally was held amid a local “strike hard” campaign that began earlier that year.

Xinjiang and Tibet

Critics have been less vocal, however, about public arrest gatherings in Xinjiang. There public rallies are often publicized as stern efforts to combat and educate the public about the “three evil forces” of “separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism,” giving them a veneer of legitimacy amid the global “war on terror.”China News Websitehas called such gatherings “a concrete action to crack down on violent terrorist crimes and to rejuvenate positive energy in society.”

In May, 7,000 people witnessed the detention, arrest, and sentencing of more than 100 Uyghurs charged with inciting splittism, terrorism, and murder in a stadium in Yili [Ili] Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture.Picturesof the event were widely circulated in official news media.

That said, public rallies in Xinjiang occur even without allegations of extremism. As recently as June 16, 2014,15 suspects shackled on blue truckswere condemned in front of 10,000 people in Tekesi [Tekes] County, Yili. They were charged with cult offenses, disrupting official business, and rape.

In contrast with Xinjiang, Tibet has received little media attention for public arrests and sentencing. The most recent instance of such an event being reported inofficial mediawas on March 9, 2012, in Jiulong [Gyezur] County. No information was made public on the allegations against the suspects and defendants but a crowd of more than 5,000 spectators, including cadres and students, watched as 24 people were detained, arrested, and tried.

In December 2011, Tibetan writer Woeser postedsix photosof Tibetan monks captured by armed police during a stability maintenance campaign in Ganzi [Kardze] and Aba [Ngaba] prefectures. The images of people bound and bedecked with placards—some in open trucks beds—were reminiscent of those subjected to public arrests and sentencing but no narrative came with the photos. Some of the placards displayed criminal charges such as splittism and gathering a crowd to attack an organ of the state. Woeser speculated that the photos were taken sometime between March 2008 and 2011.

TV Set Confessional

Public arrests and sentencing if concentrated in Xinjiang appear to exist throughout the country and in response to various anti-crime campaigns. Probably due to the nature of their transmission, televised confessions seem to be more commonly applied to celebrities and public figures who have infringed upon the economic and political interests of the party.

The most recent televised confessions were made by Jaycee Chan, son of Hong Kong action film star Jackie Chan, and Taiwanese actor Kai Ko. (Ko’s detention was reportedly publicized before his family was notified, breaking with a cross straits agreement requiring notification within 24 hours.) Both were detained on drug charges in Beijing on August 14. Their confessions were preceded in early August by that of Internet celebrityGuo Meimei, who has been charged with illegal gambling.

Foreign nationals have also been compelled to make televised confessions. In August 2013, Briton Peter Humphrey apologized to the Chinese government on Chinese Central Television for illegally obtaining private information. Broadcast narration from the news segment describes China as a country ruled by law where police fight crime regardless of whether it is committed by Chinese nationals or foreigners. Humphrey’s firm conducted investigations for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in China; the global drug company is now facing corruption allegations.

Chinese journalists have also been targeted. Chen Yongzhou (陈永州) was detained in July 2013 on suspicion of damaging business reputation after writing several newspaper articles accusing a listed company of falsifying its sales. Chen’s detention initially triggered a strong backlash in official Chinese media with several critics calling for his immediate release. The tide turned after the Central Publicity Department intervened in the case, and in late October 2013, state television aired Chen’s confession as filmed from a detention center in Changsha, Hunan Province.

In the lead up to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Protest, another journalist, Gao Yu (高瑜), became the subject of televised confession . Gao’s face was blurred as she pled guilty to “illegally procuring state secrets for foreign entities” on May 30, 2014, the day of her formal arrest. Gao was accused of circulating Document No. 9 to an overseas website. The apparently classified document lists “seven perils” threatening the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including western constitutional democracy, media independence, and civic participation. Gao was previously sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for illegally procuring state secrets in November 1994 for criticizing the violent suppression of the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Both forms of public shaming, televised confessions and public arrests and sentencing likely share the same goals: frightening criminals, educating people, and maintaining social stability. Absent from this list of aims is justice, procedural or substantive. Public law enforcement marginalizes lawyers and courtrooms and with them go dignity, presumptions of innocence, and the likelihood of a fair trial. With an emphasis on legal reform in the upcoming plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in October, perhaps one area worth revisiting is the tendency for humiliation to masquerade as justice.